Dafna

Dafna (Hebrew: דפנה) is a kibbutz in the Upper Galilee in northern Israel. Located seven kilometres east of Kiryat Shmona and surrounded by three streams of the Dan River, it falls under the jurisdiction of Upper Galilee Regional Council. In 2024 it had a population of 1,038. Dafna was founded on 3 May 1939 as a Tower and Stockade settlement, the first such settlement in the northern Hula Valley. Dafna, Beit Hillel, She'ar Yashuv and Dan were known as the "Ussishkin Fortresses", named after Menahem Ussishkin. Etymology Dafna derives from the ancient site of Daphne mentioned in classical sources. The name Daphne (Δάφνη), meaning “laurel” or “bay tree” in Greek, is attested by Josephus as a geographic designation associated with the marshes and springs of the Hula Valley. Ottoman tax registers from 1535 preserve the toponym as Mezraʿa-i Dafna, demonstrating direct continuity of the name into the early modern period, while nineteenth-century surveys record variants such as Khirbet Dafna and Ard Dafnā. This evidence indicates sustained toponymic transmission rather than later reintroduction or scholarly identification. History Early Roman pottery fragments have been found in an excavation in Dafna. Edward Robinson, who visited in 1852, identified Daphne with a "low mound of rubbish with cut stones, evidently the remains of a former town" called Difneh that he encountered while riding south from Tel el-Qadi to Mansura. The Survey of Western Palestine identified Daphne with Khirbet Dufnah, meaning "the ruin of Daphne (oleander)". An Arab settlement was founded sometime between 1858 and 1878. Difnah was listed as a village by the Mandate government in 1924. At the time of the 1931 census, Dafna had 66 occupied houses and a population of 318 Muslims and one Christian. At the beginning of 1939, the village was pillaged by bedouin, causing most of the population to leave. The land was soon purchased by the Jewish National Fund. The JNF was represented in the negotiations by the same man, Kamel Hussein, who had earlier led the raid on Tel-Hai in which Josef Trumpeldor was killed. The original Jewish residents were immigrants mostly from Poland and Lithuania. By the 1944/45 statistics, Dafna had a population of 380 Jews with a total land area of 2,663 dunams, of which Jews owned 2,189 dunams. Of this, a total of 2,385 dunams of land were irrigated or used for plantations, 5 dunums were used for cereals; while 50 dunams were classified as built-up (or Urban) area. In 1947, it had a population of 600. During early 1947 Palmach Officer Moshe Kelman was ordered by the Haganah High Command to supervise the execution and burial of a Jew accused of collaborating with the British. The execution took place at Kibbutz Dafna. After the 1948 Palestine war, Dafna took over part of the land belonging to the newly depopulated Palestinian village of Al-Sanbariyya. According to a 1949 book by the Jewish National Fund, Dafna along with other border settlements of Dan and Kfar Szold held off the Syrian and Lebanese forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. However, the settlement was often bombarded and was said to have suffered heavy damage. The fictional kibbutz Gan Dafna, its name presumably a nod to the real-life kibbutz Dafna, figures prominently in Leon Uris's book Exodus, as the hometown of the protagonist Ari Ben Caanan. 1997 helicopter disaster On 4 February 1997, at approximately 19:00, two "Yasur" Sikorsky CH 53 helicopters carrying 73 soldiers and loaded with ammunition collided in mid-air over She'ar Yashuv. One of the helicopters smashed into an open field near the cemetery of Dafna. It is believed that this accident increased the pressure on the IDF to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, finally done in May 2000. 2023 Israel–Gaza war During the Gaza war, northern Israeli border communities, including Dafna, faced targeted attacks by Hezbollah and Palestinian factions based in Lebanon, and were evacuated. On July 21, 2024, a Hezbollah rocket attack damaged a school, but there were no casualties. Climate References Bibliography External links Official website